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This whole thing is just kind of astonishing. > “I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes

This whole thing is just kind of astonishing. > “I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.” Well, then why the hell did you write it? For purely entertainment purposes? I mean, what. EDIT: Oh, wow, just got to the prompt. Did he... did he just think LLMs were _magic_? "Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced" - how the hell is ChatGPT supposed to know what can and cannot be insourced? > In late March, Lavingia published a version of the “munchable” script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. “It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.” No, that would not have been 'cool', you idiot. Bloody hell.

John23832 1y ago
... and get paid to do it while sidelining anyone with actual experience in the sector/topic. I called this when it started. They would come in, be totally ineffective to the point of breaking things, and then we would get a "shucks, sorry" later.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  I just can't believe how totally incompetent this whole thing is. Even for a Musk/Trump venture, I didn't expect quite this level of just complete nonsense.
  - nxobject 1y ago
    Imagine hiring a consultancy, and getting stuck with a team of people fresh out of college without any wisdom to guide them... I think that's what the American people got.
    - colejohnson66 1y ago
      Not just "fresh out of college", but people who think AI can solve everything. COBOL too "ancient"? Just throw AI at it! Can't write code? Throw AI at it! He literally wrote an AI prompter using AI: > Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them. This is entry/junior-level levels of incompetence being given carte blanche access to production, but where "production" includes people's livelihoods.
      - ivape 1y ago
        Did you see how two billionaires "leaders" feuded yesterday over disagreements (one was the President of the US and the other was the world's richest man)? They were the ones behind DOGE. That was the leadership behind it. We are in the fucking Twilight Zone. It's surreal. There was a epic book about the whole Iraq situation that had the most apt title: FIASCO Then there are these military terms: FUBAR - Fucked up beyond all recognition & TARFU - Totally and Royally fucked up & SNAFU - Situation Normal: All fucked up It's the people that have been to war that seem to have the words for what's going on, no one else.
      - mistrial9 1y ago
        except VA is a byzantine hellhole of self-serving dysfunction. Your outrage is only partially appropriate. Anyone around the system knows this, but has various incentives whether they will say it.
        Loughla 1y ago
        Maybe there's a balance between not doing anything about the problems in the VA and ignorantly breaking in in 48 hours?
  - eviks 1y ago
    Have you not followed the Twitter acquisition saga and the firing process that followed? It was the same thing
    - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      I remember the follow up. That Twitter was doomed and Threads, then Bluesky were absolutely going to crush it. Those were not only the popular takes here; but any claim otherwise was derided as harmful fiction. And still is.
      - eviks 1y ago
        But with such fiction for a memory would you even believe this whole thing is totally incompetent?
    - theGeatZhopa 1y ago
      thats the only reasonable way to do business. Its not a grocery store. if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs. So he did. After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on the (future) tech-stack and on that what is not needed and what can be done recoded/rebuild to save money on tech-stack even more. And then you just don't need that much work force anymore. rule no. 1 in business: If you pay, you decide. rule no.2 in business: If you pay more than you earn: close the company. key-insights: - it wasn't musk alone to decide. He had twitter's qualified employees and system architects -> pick the most skilled ones - it was a power meeting where the groups & members brainstormed excessively for longer then just 3 days in a row -> let them think about a better, simplified system design on a minimal viable tech-stack - they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force -> check & start building. pivot if neccessary I really don't undersand, why arguments like yours are still & always brought up. Is it the lack of understanding how to do business? Is it pure "hate" & ad hominem @ musk, because it's musk? What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly? The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. Thats the only differentiator to the competition: do it better, do it cheaper. So why was it bad exactly?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- itsdrewmiller 1y ago
  He didn’t get paid.
  - ipython 1y ago
    Azure OpenAI absolutely got paid.
nxobject 1y ago
The only silver lining here is his transparency about being wrong -- and providing evidence of that publicly. Given DOGE's culture of prioritizing avoiding accountability and transparency measures like FOIA [1], it's almost sadly laudable. [1] https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-doge-transparency.php https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-dog...
- rsynnott 1y ago
  But he still doesn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation, at all. Like, he's saying no-one should have used his stuff, but also "It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script". For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_. The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this. Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
    - roenxi 1y ago
      If anyone thinks drawdowns should be done of the US federal government they aren't anywhere near the levers of government. There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall. > Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.
afavour 1y ago
IMO this is indicative of the kind of questions anyone with DOGE on their resume will need to answer at their next interview. - why did you do it? - why did you not quit as soon as you realized how dangerous this was going to be? "I did what I did, I knew there were mistakes, I don't really know what was done with the output of my work and I never tried to find out" are absolutely disqualifying statements for anyone above associate level engineering.
- nilamo 1y ago
  "I needed money." Why is that not a good enough answer?
  - mrybczyn 1y ago
    "I needed money." - Charles Ponzi "I needed money." - Bernie Madoff "I needed money." - Kenneth Lay "I needed money." - Qusay Hussein
  - ndegruchy 1y ago
    Because he got paid $0. They hired him as an “intern” or volunteer.
    - morkalork 1y ago
      It's responsibility-washing. Like GP said, those answers are totally unacceptable coming from an engineering professional. Which is exactly why they took on interns to do it.
    - nilamo 1y ago
      Ah, then we got what we paid for.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Well: (a) It doesn't appear to actually have come with a salary. (b) Even if it paid, it slightly stretches credulity given his background that it was the only job that he could get.
nop_slide 1y ago
> did he just think LLMs were _magic_? If you happened to follow this particular developer, yes he does think they're magic.
- zeta0134 1y ago
  It doesn't even take very long messing around with the things to quickly realize how much smoke and mirrors is involved. Next time you get a good response from your favorite LLM, go ahead, hit "regenerate" a few times. Look at how different the responses can be, from the same initial prompt, with just a liiiiitle push in the RNG weights. Sometimes it's remarkably correct! Sometimes it's remarkably *incorrect* and confident about it. Which one did you get this time?
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    But, like, in this case, _even if the LLM was a superhuman AGI_, there is _still_ no way it could do what he wants based off the prompt he gave it because it simply would not have the sort of in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of the VA required to make these determinations. Even if we waive the "LLMs are bit shit" stipulation, it still doesn't really help much.
    - lawn 1y ago
      To be fair, a superhuman AGI should've told him that what he's trying to do is impossible. (Not that an LLM will ever get there though.)
esafak 1y ago
@sahillavingia is a member and wrote about his DOGE experience recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116061
FrustratedMonky 1y ago
Maybe this engineer is just saying, like all big projects, there are mistakes, and there should be more vetting, debugging. It was rushed, so yes, there are mistakes, but not, "generally, all my stuff is bug ridden crap"
- mdhb 1y ago
  But in this case it WAS all bug ridden crap. Casually rolling the dice with people’s lives like this means you probably won’t be able to live without some fear of people coming looking for you when this is all said and over. Maybe they don’t realise it yet but their lives have just changed for the worse in a very significant and hard to reverse way. This is going to catch up with them on a reasonable timescale.
- sumeno 1y ago
  This isn't your typical SV startup. Move fast and break things works for garbage like Juicero or Uber for Dogs or whatever silly idea gets VC funding this week, it does not work when you're talking about the lives of millions of people
- FrustratedMonky 1y ago
  I was making a comment on software projects, not a political statement. Thanks for the downvotes. Of course the situation is awful, but not every programmer gets to cherry pick the picture perfect project to work on. The job market is difficult right now, so who wouldn't take this one? That's the more insidious message from capitalism, there are a lot of cogs in the machine that are fully aware they are cogs, but you still have to eat, so you keep doing cog like things.
TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
I think you are misinterpreting the comment here. >I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant. > It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled. This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context. >Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake. He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc. Calling him an idiot for being transparent is a personal attack, and has no place here. Directly from the github: Tools I have written to do stuff more effectively at the VA. Code exists to make humans more efficient; not to replace them. All code leads to human review. Feedback appreciated!
- thisisit 1y ago
  Spoken like a developer who doesn't understand how real world works. > Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant. Lavingia didn't provide any provable metric that this tool was going a "huge time saver". Additionally, if the output isn't the "truth", what can kind of time saving is expected? That a person needs to run the code, get result and then spend time analyzing results and cross verifying contracts again? You know what will be a good time saver? Open the contracts and cross check it if it is valid. No AI slop required. > This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context. Real people are impacted by VA contracts. If there is even 1 contract impacting even 100s of people that is enough damage. Saying that this is people taking things out of context shows your of empathy for other human beings, at least if they are not coders. Because apparently Lavingia should get kudos for his transparency. But calling him an idiot for his lack of self-awareness that he had no clue about government contracts and should not be writing AI and creating this mess, all the while impacting people's life? Well we can't have that. > He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc. If human review is the point then start from there. Don't write AI slop, generate wrong result and then ask for human review. To the larger point - Benjamin Franklin said - 'It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer'. In the same vein every well meaning contract/legislation which is helping 100s will have 10s exploiting the loophole. People like Lavingia and from DOGE seemed to have decided that rooting out those 10s is worth hurting the 100s. So, lets write an AI for that.
ryandrake 1y ago
> Mistakes Were Made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

John23832 1y ago

... and get paid to do it while sidelining anyone with actual experience in the sector/topic. I called this when it started. They would come in, be totally ineffective to the point of breaking things, and then we would get a "shucks, sorry" later.

rsynnott 1y ago
I just can't believe how totally incompetent this whole thing is. Even for a Musk/Trump venture, I didn't expect quite this level of just complete nonsense.
- nxobject 1y ago
  Imagine hiring a consultancy, and getting stuck with a team of people fresh out of college without any wisdom to guide them... I think that's what the American people got.
  - colejohnson66 1y ago
    Not just "fresh out of college", but people who think AI can solve everything. COBOL too "ancient"? Just throw AI at it! Can't write code? Throw AI at it! He literally wrote an AI prompter using AI: > Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them. This is entry/junior-level levels of incompetence being given carte blanche access to production, but where "production" includes people's livelihoods.
    - ivape 1y ago
      Did you see how two billionaires "leaders" feuded yesterday over disagreements (one was the President of the US and the other was the world's richest man)? They were the ones behind DOGE. That was the leadership behind it. We are in the fucking Twilight Zone. It's surreal. There was a epic book about the whole Iraq situation that had the most apt title: FIASCO Then there are these military terms: FUBAR - Fucked up beyond all recognition & TARFU - Totally and Royally fucked up & SNAFU - Situation Normal: All fucked up It's the people that have been to war that seem to have the words for what's going on, no one else.
    - mistrial9 1y ago
      except VA is a byzantine hellhole of self-serving dysfunction. Your outrage is only partially appropriate. Anyone around the system knows this, but has various incentives whether they will say it.
      - Loughla 1y ago
        Maybe there's a balance between not doing anything about the problems in the VA and ignorantly breaking in in 48 hours?
- eviks 1y ago
  Have you not followed the Twitter acquisition saga and the firing process that followed? It was the same thing
  - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    I remember the follow up. That Twitter was doomed and Threads, then Bluesky were absolutely going to crush it. Those were not only the popular takes here; but any claim otherwise was derided as harmful fiction. And still is.
    - eviks 1y ago
      But with such fiction for a memory would you even believe this whole thing is totally incompetent?
  - theGeatZhopa 1y ago
    thats the only reasonable way to do business. Its not a grocery store. if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs. So he did. After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on the (future) tech-stack and on that what is not needed and what can be done recoded/rebuild to save money on tech-stack even more. And then you just don't need that much work force anymore. rule no. 1 in business: If you pay, you decide. rule no.2 in business: If you pay more than you earn: close the company. key-insights: - it wasn't musk alone to decide. He had twitter's qualified employees and system architects -> pick the most skilled ones - it was a power meeting where the groups & members brainstormed excessively for longer then just 3 days in a row -> let them think about a better, simplified system design on a minimal viable tech-stack - they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force -> check & start building. pivot if neccessary I really don't undersand, why arguments like yours are still & always brought up. Is it the lack of understanding how to do business? Is it pure "hate" & ad hominem @ musk, because it's musk? What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly? The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. Thats the only differentiator to the competition: do it better, do it cheaper. So why was it bad exactly?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
itsdrewmiller 1y ago
He didn’t get paid.
- ipython 1y ago
  Azure OpenAI absolutely got paid.

nxobject 1y ago

The only silver lining here is his transparency about being wrong -- and providing evidence of that publicly. Given DOGE's culture of prioritizing avoiding accountability and transparency measures like FOIA [1], it's almost sadly laudable. [1] https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-doge-transparency.php https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-dog...

rsynnott 1y ago
But he still doesn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation, at all. Like, he's saying no-one should have used his stuff, but also "It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script". For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_. The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this. Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    If anyone thinks drawdowns should be done of the US federal government they aren't anywhere near the levers of government. There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall. > Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.

afavour 1y ago

IMO this is indicative of the kind of questions anyone with DOGE on their resume will need to answer at their next interview. - why did you do it? - why did you not quit as soon as you realized how dangerous this was going to be? "I did what I did, I knew there were mistakes, I don't really know what was done with the output of my work and I never tried to find out" are absolutely disqualifying statements for anyone above associate level engineering.

nilamo 1y ago
"I needed money." Why is that not a good enough answer?
- mrybczyn 1y ago
  "I needed money." - Charles Ponzi "I needed money." - Bernie Madoff "I needed money." - Kenneth Lay "I needed money." - Qusay Hussein
- ndegruchy 1y ago
  Because he got paid $0. They hired him as an “intern” or volunteer.
  - morkalork 1y ago
    It's responsibility-washing. Like GP said, those answers are totally unacceptable coming from an engineering professional. Which is exactly why they took on interns to do it.
  - nilamo 1y ago
    Ah, then we got what we paid for.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Well: (a) It doesn't appear to actually have come with a salary. (b) Even if it paid, it slightly stretches credulity given his background that it was the only job that he could get.

nop_slide 1y ago

> did he just think LLMs were _magic_? If you happened to follow this particular developer, yes he does think they're magic.

zeta0134 1y ago
It doesn't even take very long messing around with the things to quickly realize how much smoke and mirrors is involved. Next time you get a good response from your favorite LLM, go ahead, hit "regenerate" a few times. Look at how different the responses can be, from the same initial prompt, with just a liiiiitle push in the RNG weights. Sometimes it's remarkably correct! Sometimes it's remarkably *incorrect* and confident about it. Which one did you get this time?
- rsynnott 1y ago
  But, like, in this case, _even if the LLM was a superhuman AGI_, there is _still_ no way it could do what he wants based off the prompt he gave it because it simply would not have the sort of in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of the VA required to make these determinations. Even if we waive the "LLMs are bit shit" stipulation, it still doesn't really help much.
  - lawn 1y ago
    To be fair, a superhuman AGI should've told him that what he's trying to do is impossible. (Not that an LLM will ever get there though.)

esafak 1y ago

@sahillavingia is a member and wrote about his DOGE experience recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116061

FrustratedMonky 1y ago

Maybe this engineer is just saying, like all big projects, there are mistakes, and there should be more vetting, debugging. It was rushed, so yes, there are mistakes, but not, "generally, all my stuff is bug ridden crap"

mdhb 1y ago
But in this case it WAS all bug ridden crap. Casually rolling the dice with people’s lives like this means you probably won’t be able to live without some fear of people coming looking for you when this is all said and over. Maybe they don’t realise it yet but their lives have just changed for the worse in a very significant and hard to reverse way. This is going to catch up with them on a reasonable timescale.
sumeno 1y ago
This isn't your typical SV startup. Move fast and break things works for garbage like Juicero or Uber for Dogs or whatever silly idea gets VC funding this week, it does not work when you're talking about the lives of millions of people
FrustratedMonky 1y ago
I was making a comment on software projects, not a political statement. Thanks for the downvotes. Of course the situation is awful, but not every programmer gets to cherry pick the picture perfect project to work on. The job market is difficult right now, so who wouldn't take this one? That's the more insidious message from capitalism, there are a lot of cogs in the machine that are fully aware they are cogs, but you still have to eat, so you keep doing cog like things.

TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago

I think you are misinterpreting the comment here. >I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant. > It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled. This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context. >Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake. He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc. Calling him an idiot for being transparent is a personal attack, and has no place here. Directly from the github: Tools I have written to do stuff more effectively at the VA. Code exists to make humans more efficient; not to replace them. All code leads to human review. Feedback appreciated!

thisisit 1y ago
Spoken like a developer who doesn't understand how real world works. > Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant. Lavingia didn't provide any provable metric that this tool was going a "huge time saver". Additionally, if the output isn't the "truth", what can kind of time saving is expected? That a person needs to run the code, get result and then spend time analyzing results and cross verifying contracts again? You know what will be a good time saver? Open the contracts and cross check it if it is valid. No AI slop required. > This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context. Real people are impacted by VA contracts. If there is even 1 contract impacting even 100s of people that is enough damage. Saying that this is people taking things out of context shows your of empathy for other human beings, at least if they are not coders. Because apparently Lavingia should get kudos for his transparency. But calling him an idiot for his lack of self-awareness that he had no clue about government contracts and should not be writing AI and creating this mess, all the while impacting people's life? Well we can't have that. > He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc. If human review is the point then start from there. Don't write AI slop, generate wrong result and then ask for human review. To the larger point - Benjamin Franklin said - 'It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer'. In the same vein every well meaning contract/legislation which is helping 100s will have 10s exploiting the loophole. People like Lavingia and from DOGE seemed to have decided that rooting out those 10s is worth hurting the 100s. So, lets write an AI for that.

ryandrake 1y ago

> Mistakes Were Made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made